Russian and Portuguese sound the same because they’re both next to Galicia

Archaeologists find copy of Homer’s Iliad inside ancient Egyptian mummy Papyrus fragment discovered inside mummy buried in Roman-era tomb around 1,600 years ago

This is very cool.

And the answer to the question you're all thinking: the catalogue of ships in Il. 2 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Summer school in historical sociolinguistics at Ghent University for "graduate students and young (at heart!) researchers":

open.substack.com/pub/oldnorth...

Opening page of a gorgeous bilingual translation of the Gospels of St. Matthew & St. Mark (probably had the rest at some point, is now fragmentary), Ottoman Turkish in an elegant nastaʿliq hand on the left, in Latin on the right, copied in 1660 somewhere in the Ottoman world (SBB Ms. or. oct. 3960):

The 16 Percent Ceiling: a rule only Xi can break PropagandaScope has new findings

I measured every People's Daily front page for the last 17 months, to the pixel. A single article has not exceeded 16% of the page in that window — unless the subject is Xi Jinping.
open.substack.com/pub/soyonbo/...

New @tibetnetwork.bsky.social report: China's push to replace #Tibet with Xizang isn't a linguistic correction — it's a neo-colonial erasure campaign. From Paris museums to UN documents, the renaming is slowly spreading. Here's why it matters (and how to push back): tibetnetwork.org/tibet-not-xi...

Xinjiang’s Repression of Uyghurs Has Evolved, Not Ended A rare insider testimony reveals how China tries to hide state violence in Xinjiang

NEW EVIDENCE: Former Xinjiang police officer (2014–2023) confirms that detentions and forced labor continue today.

From 2023, officials detained Uyghurs who avoided forced labor or allegedly disobeyed state orders.

Thread below:

foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/16/c...

🇹🇷 Test à la #BULAC jusqu'au 8 mai : l'Encyclopedia of Turkic Languages and Linguistics Online de Brill !

📚 Du vieux turc aux langues turciques contemporaines, découvrez une ressource de référence du monde turcophone.

✍️ Testez, explorez et donnez-nous votre avis !

👉 www.bulac.fr/node/3563

Haenisch (though they are quite similar). "Altan Toptji" (if I read this correctly) might point to Mostaert's 1952 edition of Altan Tobči. Anyway, as Mullie and Mostaert were colleagues, Mullie might also have used unpublished materials by Mostaert. Or, of course, his own.

Ok. One should not look at such things late in the evening… I see now that both systems of transcriptions rather point to Father Mostaert: The phonetic transcription matches the on used by M. in his description of the Ordos dialect and the words from the SH also look more like Mostaert than like

Interesting question. I will check tomorrow!

Haenisch’s dictionary appeared first in 1939, the reconstruction in 1941, Ramstedt’s Khalkha phonology in 1902, so this probably leaves quite a big space for a possible dating…

These seem to be comparisons with Haenisch’s textual reconstruction and/or dictionary as well as Ramstedt’s Khalkha phonology.

For this week‘s #MarginaliaMonday, I have a copy of the 元朝祕史 in store: The text is written in Chinese characters phonetically representing #Mongolian. The annotator seemingly tried to represent it in Mongolian, Western transcriptions, and other Chinese characters. #ChinaBooks #Sinology

Insular Northern Frisian (maybe other varieties of Frisian as well) has preserved dual in pronouns (forms from Sylt dialect):
sg: ik, dü, hi/jü/hat;
du: wat, at, jat;
pl: wü, i, ja

Smuggling shadowed every China Navigation Co. voyage - bold, audacious, and woven into daily life. In the chaos of departure, 'pidgin' contraband slipped aboard: opium, alcohol, tobacco, textiles. Sailors looked away… or helped. #EYACrime Read more here: https://ow.ly/PqPy50Ysl2S

An exciting find I made earlier this year: likely the earliest girl detective manga, and possibly even the earliest detective manga regardless of gender: the first episode of "Girl Private Detective" (Shojo shiritsu tantei) by Wada Kunibo in Shojo Kurabu (Girls' Club) in 1932.

Hongkong Kowloon walled city, 1980s.
A narrow alley, barely wide enough for two people. An older woman walks a child through cracked concrete and exposed pipes. A place of no planning, no clear ownership, no real state control. At its peak, around 50,000 people lived here in just 2.6 hectares

Husum je tež rjany 😉

The map of "China" from the 3rd edition of Evariste Régis Huc's (1813-1860) L'Empire chinois (1857).

The map of "China" from the 3rd edition of Evariste Régis Huc's (1813-1860) L'Empire chinois (1857).

The map of "China" from the 3rd edition of Evariste Régis Huc's (1813-1860) L'Empire chinois (1857).

The map of "China" from the 3rd edition of Evariste Régis Huc's (1813-1860) L'Empire chinois (1857).

The map of "China" from the 3rd edition of Evariste Régis Huc's (1813-1860) L'Empire chinois (1857). Note how the provinces of China proper (in green) are distinguished from the broader Qing empire of which they were part.

Some nouns rel. to smithing in Old Uyghur from U 168 1r 9-13:

/urdun/ anvil
/bazgan/ hammer
/kısgač/ tongs

/takı ančulayu kaltı urdun bazgan kısgač, kim käntü ol ok tämirän etilmiš ol, yana kamag tämiräg käntü yančar/

turfan.bbaw.de/dta/u/images...

ET ⬇️

PropagandaScope in Newsweek.

Our data shows China's "ethnic unity" slogan is amplified up to 15x more in minority regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia compared with the national People's Daily.

This is what the platform was built to reveal. The data is public and growing.

In some languages, "chocolate" has a "d" at the end. It's because of Dutch!

After their arrival in Mexico, Spanish gained the word "chocolate" from the local language Nahuatl and spread it to other languages. (1/2)

Longyu Zhang (Ghent University) and I are thinking about initiating a Tangut working group in the style of a Transcribathon or a crowdsourced transcription project, in which we collaborate to produce an open dataset of published Tangut text editions or manuscript images.*
1/3

"Soul Casting": Leaked Document Reveals How China Controls What Minority Students Read An internal directive from Inner Mongolia University establishes a five-step system to politically vet every minority-language textbook.

"Soul Casting": Leaked Document Reveals How China Controls What Minority Students Read
open.substack.com/pub/soyonbo/...

ABELAO: Cours d'été de langues anciennes et orientales à Louvain-la-Neuve (4-14 août 2026). Cours en français et en anglais. Réductions early birds jusqu'au 15 avril 2026! abelao.be

This is also shown by loans with PG *s into W Slavic which show š (ž) instead of the readily available s/z, e.g. Czech ‹žejbrovat› ‘cleanse’, Czech ‹žehnat›, Sorbian ‹žohnować› ‘bless’ or Sorbian ‹wusmuž› ‘mush, porridge’, from O/MHG *wīzmuos ‘white mush’ (*i > u is Sorbian), with both PG *t and *s.

Polacy na Dalekim Wschodzie, Grochowski, Kazimierz, Harbin 1928

This flag symbolized the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), a joint Sino-Russian venture established under the 1896 Li–Lobanov Treaty, which granted Russia a concession to build a railway through Manchuria. Adopted in 1897, it served as the official emblem for the Russian-managed company, displaying its authority at railway stations and facilities like those in Harbin.

Cossacks guard the CER bridge over the Sungari River in Harbin during the Russo-Japanese War (1905)

A thread 🧵 on Polish palaeontologists in Harbin

There used to be (~30k strong) Polish population in the city of Harbin (哈尔滨), during Russian occupation of North China & partition of Poland. The population was composed of Socialist Poles who were banished as punishment for anti-Tsarist uprisings.

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us